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Tuesday, 8 May 2012

NUS LGBT Conference 2012

Ken Smailes

NUS LGBT
Conference, a weekend of drama, policy, motions, Manchester nightlife and
development of LGBT rights. I can honestly say I have never been to such an
encouraging and thought-provoking conference. The Reading University delegation
decided that we would all write a blog/report so that you and the society can see
how we voted on your behalf and to encourage you to get involved in the LGBT
movement and the fight for ever-increasing rights.

Over the
weekend, I attended a number of different workshops, the most
interesting and important to me was one titled ‘faith and sexuality, a
dialogue’. This workshop had a lot of relevance to me as I grew up in a very
Christian family and have always found the relationship between faith and
sexuality particularly difficult to negotiate. The workshop gave advice and how
to workshops to have an open and frank discussion about how sexuality and
different faiths can work together; you don’t just have to have one or another.
It was also really interesting to see how many people at conference both defined
as LGBT and as with faith, which was encouraging.

The weekend
was mainly filled with motion debate; these motions go into NUS LGBT policy and
dictate how the campaign is run over the next year. I am happy to say that the
majority of policy passed was brilliant, it included motions to encourage more
work on helping trans people parent, sexual health, more equal representation of
bisexual people and continuation of the campaign on ending the blood donation
ban for men who sleep with men. The motion that did seem to be most
controversial was that including Harry Potter and Dumbledore as a gay figure,
this definitely brought some strong opinions from the conference floor. All
these motions and discussion was really heartening but did make me want to stay
on another year to be able to work on these new campaigns!

Lastly the
highlight of the weekend for me had to be the NUS LGBT awards and Gala Dinner
which celebrated 40 years of the NUS LGBT campaign. There were a total of six
awards up for grabs and Reading University Student Union LGBT was eligible for 5
of these. I am very proud to say that we were shortlisted for three of them,
which means we were in the top five for these categories out of nearly 100
institutions!! These were Campaign of the Year, Society Development Award and
LGBT Higher Education Student of the Year. To get this amount of shortlists was
incredible; it is testament to the work of the society, the amazing people in it
and the lengths we have all come. You should all feel so proud of yourself and I
know we are only going to get better year on year.